There are many medical procedures where a surgeon needs to attach soft tissue to bone. The soft tissue can be tendon or other connective tissue. One very common example of this is rotator cuff repair where a portion or all of the rotator cuff is torn or detached from the humerus. When the rotator cuff tears from the humerus, the result is pain and loss of function. When a patient presents with a significant rotator cuff tear, surgical repair is performed. The goal of surgical repair of the rotator cuff is to secure the tendon to the bone in a stabile manner so that the tendon can reattach to the bone and can heal. If the tendon is not stable and oscillation or micro-motion between the tendon and bone develops, the healing process will be interrupted. In this situation, it is less likely that the tendon will heal properly to the bone, resulting in a re-tear. Thus, the more stable the repair, the more successfully the tendon will heal to the bone.
Arthroscopic rotator cuff repair has grown in popularity in recent years, and more specifically, the use of “knotless” suture anchors has also become the technique of choice for many surgeons and other operators. However, current knotless suture anchors may be overly complex to use or do not provide for adequate tension to the suture, resulting in the aforementioned instability of the repair resulting in micro-motion of the tissue. Current knotless suture anchors also lack a reliable “self-tapping” technique, whereby the anchor can be implanted into bone without the need of a bonehole created prior to implantation.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a reliable, reproducible knotless suture anchor and methodology that can obtain consistently strong results while being simple to use.